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The CPI (M) and stages of revolution

By Dipankar Basu

March 25, 2008 -- This article attempts to throw some light on the
following two questions: (1) How does the classical Marxist tradition
conceptualise the relationship between the two stages of revolution:
democratic and the socialist? (2) Does the democratic revolution lead
to deepening and widening capitalism? Is capitalism necessary to
develop the productive capacity of a society?

The answer to the first
question emerges from the idea of the “revolution of permanence”
proposed by Marx in 1850, accepted, extended and enriched by Lenin as
“uninterrupted revolution” and simultaneously developed by Trotsky as
“permanent revolution”. This theoretical development was brilliantly
put into practice by Lenin between the February and October revolutions
in Russia in 1917. The answer to the second question emerges clearly
from the debates on the national and colonial question in the Second
Congress of the Third International in 1920. From this debate what
emerges is the idea of the democratic revolution led by the proletariat
as the start of the process of non-capitalist path of the development
of the productive capacity of society, moving towards the future
socialist revolution. Rather than deepening and widening capitalism,
the democratic revolution under the proletariat leads society in the
opposite direction, in a socialist, i.e., proletarian direction.
Promoting capitalism is not necessary for the development of the
productive capacity of a country.

***

This brief historical note has been occasioned by recent attempts to
justify the championing of capitalism by a communist party – Communist
Party of India (Marxist) – as the vehicle for its industrialization
program in West Bengal, India. The justification, which argues for the
necessity of capitalism by taking recourse to the distinction between
the two stages of revolution, rests on an erroneous reading of
international working class theory and practice. While it correctly
posits the distinction between the two stages of social revolution, it
does so mechanically, formally, and in a one-sided manner; the crucial
and related question of the relationship between the two
stages is not accorded the attention it deserves. That, in my opinion,
is the primary source of error and leads to arguing for the necessity
of “deepening and widening” capitalism as against initiating
efforts to transcend it.

Such a reformist position is of course not new
within the international working class movement; in fact it is
strikingly similar in several crucial respects to the Menshevik
position in early twentieth century Russia as also to the stance of
“social democracy” that developed from Bernstenian “revisionism” in
late nineteenth century Germany. This position, moreover, is decidedly
not part of the Leninist tradition - the Bolshevik tradition that
developed in Russia - or any revolutionary tradition within Marxism;
this should be immediately obvious from the enormous theoretical and
political effort that Lenin put in combating its deleterious
consequences for the historical project of the Russian proletariat.

The issue of the analytical distinction between the two stages of
the world-historical revolution has been accepted within the
international working class movement, at least of the Marxist variety,
for about 150 years. With the publication of the Communist Manifesto,
this issue was more or less settled among communists. In
pre-revolutionary Russia, this distinction was accepted by all streams
of Marxists: the Legal Marxists, the Economists and the
Social-Democrats. This distinction was never the bone of contention in
the fiery debates in pre-revolutionary Russia between the Bolsheviks
and the Mensheviks. Neither was this distinction a major point of
departure in pre-revolutionary China; nor is this distinction the point
of debate within the Marxist left in India. Hence, merely positing this
distinction anew, a century after it was accepted by the international
working class movement, is hardly sufficient for the development of a
Marxist theoretical position. Attention needs to be instead focused, in
my opinion, on the more important issue of correctly conceptualizing
the relationship between the two stages.

It is not merely a recognition of the distinction but the
conceptualization of the relationship between the two that
distinguishes the various streams of the Left; that is as much true
today as it has been historically. I will demonstrate, by a careful
reading of the historical development of Marxist theory and practice,
that it is the conceptualization of this relationship that has
distinguished the revolutionary from the reformist Marxist stream at
crucial historical junctures: Marx and Engels from the other socialists
during the middle of the 19th century; the Legal Marxists and the
Economists from the early Social-Democrats (including the young Lenin)
during the last decade of the 19th century in pre-revolutionary Russia;
the Mensheviks from the Bolsheviks in later years leading up to and
after the October revolution; Lenin (and Trotsky) from the other
Bolsheviks between the February and October revolutions.

Before beginning the main story, two clarifications are in order.
First, I would like to state more precisely the sense in which the word
“revolution” is used, and second, I would like to indicate the two very
different senses in which the phrase “social democrat” will be used
throughout this paper. Revolution, in this paper, stands for social revolution, a phenomenon which has been defined by Theda Skocpol’s in the following way:

“Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s
state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part
carried through by class-based revolts from below… What is unique to
social revolution is that basic changes in social structure and in
political structure occur together in a mutually reinforcing fashion.
And these changes occur through intense socio-political conflicts in
which class struggles play a key role.” (Skocpol, 1979)

As Foran (2005) has argued, there are three important
characteristics of a social revolution (embedded in the above
definition) that needs to be always kept in mind: rapid political
change, deep and lasting structural transformation of the economy and
active mass participation; whenever I refer to revolution, I will mean
the explosive combination of these three elements.

The second point is a terminological clarification regarding the two
diametrically opposed use of the phrase “social democrat” in this
paper. Social-democrat, with the all important hyphen, will refer to
the Marxist revolutionaries in Russia; that is precisely how they
referred to themselves and I want to stick to that terminology as well.
The hyphen between “social” and “democrat” denotes the indissoluble
link between the dual historical tasks of the international
proletariat, a theme we will return to constantly throughout this
paper. Recall that the first Marxist political party in Russia was
called the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP); though
Lenin’s April Theses in 1917 had ended with the proposal to
change the name of the RSDWP, it was only in 1918 that the party
formally started using the term that Marx had preferred: communist.

Social democrat, without the hyphen, on the other hand will refer to
representatives of the reformist trend in the international working
class movement: Bernstein and his followers, the later Kautsky, the
later Plekhanov and the Mensheviks in Russia certainly but also later
day reformist socialists in Europe and Asia. Note, in passing, that
social democracy has a long history, especially in Western Europe, and
is marked by certain unmistakable characteristics which we can easily
discern in our midst even today: legal opposition within a bourgeois
parliamentary framework, willingness to ally with sundry bourgeois
parties, undue and an over emphasis on the need for reforms within the
system, indefinite postponement of decisive struggles, the attempt to
“manage” the contradiction between labour and capital rather than to
resolve it in the favour of labour, etc. The reformist and the
revolutionary streams also differ markedly in their understanding of
social revolution: for the reformists, revolution will emerge ready
made from the womb of history by its ineluctable laws; the role of
human intervention, though formally accepted, is relegated to a
secondary position. For revolutionaries like Lenin and the Bolsheviks
and Trotsky, on the other hand, revolution has to be first and foremost
made by human intervention, mass political action riding on the tide of
history.

Marx: From the Manifesto to the Communist League

In the Communist Manifesto published on the eve of a revolutionary
wave in Europe in 1848, Marx and Engels had summarized the materialist
understanding of historical development. The struggle between social
classes was identified as the motor force of historical change, with
the victorious class rapidly reorganizing the whole structure of
material production accompanied by changes in the political, cultural
and ideological spheres of social life. Generalizing from English and
French history, Marx and Engels identified two stages in this
world-historical movement: the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the
proletarian-socialist revolution. The bourgeois revolution, led by the
revolutionary bourgeoisie, in alliance with the oppressed peasantry,
would overthrow the feudal order and usher in bourgeois capitalism. The
development of capitalism would go hand in and with the growth and
development (political, social, ideological and technological) of the
proletariat, the grave digger of capitalism; in due time, when the
productive forces of society had developed to support a higher form of
social organization and when the proletariat had become mature and
strong politically, it would usher in the socialist revolution and
begin the process of the transcendence of class society.

Quite early on Marx had started realizing the limitations of the
strict schema of the two stages of revolution (the bourgeois-democratic
to be followed by the proletarian-socialist) that he had generalized
from English and French history and that he, along with Engels, had so
eloquently summarized in the Communist Manifesto. There are two
historical reasons which, to our mind, prompted Marx to question this
schema. First, the whole generalization referred to a historical period
where the proletariat had not yet entered into political stage; if the
proletariat were to enter the historical stage even before the
completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution that would change the
historical dynamics radically. Second, there might be historical
reasons because of which the bourgeoisie of a particular country is
“weak” and therefore incapable of and unwilling to lead the democratic
revolution to completion; and so in this case, the strict schema
presented in the Communist Manifesto would again need modification.
With the advantage of hindsight we can see that the modifications that
would need to be worked out would specifically relate to two issues:
the relationship between the two revolutions and the class-leadership
in the democratic stage of the revolution.

A close reading shows that even in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and
Engels had taken care to allow possibilities of different trajectories,
than the one they had sketched, in concrete circumstances. For
instance, they had explicitly referred to the potential weakness of the
German bourgeoisie and therefore hinted at the possibility of the
proletariat having to take the responsibility of the democratic
revolution. Once the German bourgeoisie had shown it’s true colors in
1848, whereby it regrouped with feudal elements to keep the proletariat
in check and thereby aborted the democratic revolution, Marx had
started his decisive move away from the schema of the Manifesto. While
maintaining the analytical distinction between the two stages, he drew
a much closer link between them. This more nuanced position was
explicitly brought to the fore in his address to the Central Committee
of the Communist League in London in 1850. Drawing lessons from the
recent revolutionary upsurge in Europe and looking to the future, he
drew attention of the international working class to the essential
continuity between the two stages of the revolution, what Lenin would
later characterize as the “indissoluble link” between the two
revolutions.

“While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution
to a conclusion as quickly as possible … it is our interest and task to
make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing
classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, until the
proletariat has conquered state power and the association of
proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries
of the world, has advanced so far that competition among proletarians
of these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive
forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the
issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its
annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the
abolition of classes, not the improvement of existing society but the
foundation of a new one.” (Marx, 1850)

The two most crucial, and intimately related, ideas that stand out
in this speech are the utmost necessity of maintaining the independence
of the proletariat vis-a-vis the liberal bourgeoisie and of realizing
the continuity of the two revolutions in practice. Arguing for the
creation, in all situations and at all costs, of an independent party
of the proletariat, Marx had exhorted the proletariat at the same time
to aim for the “revolution of permanence”.

“But they [i.e., the proletariat] must do the utmost for their final
victory by clarifying their minds as to what their class interests are,
by taking up their position as an independent party as soon as
possible, and by not allowing themselves to be seduced for a single
moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeois
into refraining from the independent organization of the party of the
proletariat. Their battle cry must be: The Revolution of Permanence.”
(Marx, 1850)

This remarkable document, in essence, foreshadows much of what
emerged as Bolshevism in late nineteenth century Russia. The tight and
indissoluble link between the twin tasks of the proletariat (and hence
the indissoluble link between the democratic and the socialist
revolutions), the utmost importance of maintaining an independent
political position of the proletariat, the utter necessity of avoiding
tailism in practical politics, themes that were hammered out later by
the Bolsheviks in the heat of the Russian revolution are already
present in Marx’s speech to the Communist League. It is clear that
Lenin’s idea of an “uninterrupted revolution”, a position he stressed
in his debates with the reformists in Russia, and Trotsky’s idea of a
“permanent revolution” are both derived from this speech of Marx.

Note however that the formulation of the necessity of the
“leadership” of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution
is still not explicitly developed by Marx. Revolutionary
social-democrats in Russia, reflecting on and reacting to the specific
context of the Russian revolution extended the classical Marxist
framework by taking the idea of the class-independence of the
proletariat, which is already there in Marx, one step further by
arguing for its leadership position in the bourgeois-democratic
revolution.

Legal Marxists and Economists: Early Debates in Russia

The origin of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) can be traced
back to a relatively little known “conference” of nine men in Minsk in
March 1898. Though none of the nine men played any leading role in the
subsequent revolutionary history of Russia, the conference did come out
with a “manifesto of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party” as a
precursor of later-day party programmes. The manifesto unequivocally
accepted Marx’s historical account of the two stages of the future
social revolution (as worked out by Marx and Engels in the Communist
Manifesto): bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian-socialist
revolution. More important and interesting from our viewpoint, the
Minsk conference manifesto went on to argue that the Russian
bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying through the bourgeois-democratic
revolution to the end and thus identified the young Russian proletariat
as the historical agent on whose able shoulders fell the “dual task” of
both revolutions: the democratic and the socialist.

When, therefore, the second Congress - the defining congress of the
Russian revolution, the birthplace of Bolshevism as a political stream
- of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) met in 1903
to debate on the party programme, it worked within the framework
inaugurated by the conference of 1898. It started with the dual tasks
of the Russian proletariat, i.e., the twin tasks of the democratic and
the socialist revolution, as an axiom, as a point of departure, as a
self-evident historical and political truth; there was no disagreement
or debate on this point with the RSDWP. The real debate was on how to
define the content of these revolutions and on how to define the
relationship between the two; it was the issue of the relationship that
was to rend the RSDWP into two factions, the Mensheviks and the
Bolsheviks. But before looking at that debate, we must spend some time
studying the debates that preceded the second Congress, the debates of
the young Lenin with the Legal Marxists and the Economists; a study of
the early debates is interesting and useful because many of the
positions of the Mensheviks were repetitions of either the Economists’
or the Legal Marxists’ discredited positions, positions against which
the whole RSDWP had argued during these early years.

Before the RSDWP could consolidate the political-economic tasks of
the proletariat concisely in a party programme, it had to successfully
argue against three contemporary socialist trends within
late-nineteenth century Russia: the Narodniks, the Legal Marxists and
the Economists. The theoretical arguments against the Narodniks were
largely, and successfully, carried home by Plekhanov, the Father of
Russian Marxism; when Lenin did join the fray, he largely repeated
Plekhanov’s arguments and marshaled empirical evidence in favour of the
general Marxist point about the development of capitalism in Russia.
From this he drew an important political conclusion that separated the
Social-Democrats from the Narodniks forever: the proletariat and not
the peasantry was to be the historical agent of social revolution in
Russia. The development of capitalism in Russian agriculture was,
according to Lenin, accelerating the class divisions among the
peasantry; the peasantry, as a single, homogeneous social entity was
rapidly disappearing and so basing a strategy of social revolution on
this vanishing social entity was historic folly. The only stable social
class that was emerging and strengthening itself with capitalism and
whose interests were in contradiction to capitalism was the
proletariat; hence, argued Lenin, the only feasible strategy of
revolution could be one led by and in the long-term interests of the
proletariat.

As to the other two trends, Legal Marxism and Economism, it was
Lenin’s energetic intervention and crystal-clear prose that ripped
apart their arguments and exposed their utter hollowness. As Lenin
remarked several times later in his life, the debate with the Legal
Marxists and the Economists foreshadowed the subsequent, fierce and
often bitter, debates between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In both
debates, as also his debates with the Narodniks, what distinguished
Lenin’s position from his opponents was his consistent, unwavering and
uncompromising class viewpoint, the viewpoint of the emerging Russian
proletariat.

Lenin’s debate with the Legal Marxists and the Economists (rather
than with the Narodniks) is more relevant for our current discussion
because this debate related directly to the issue of the correct
understanding of the relationship between the dual tasks of the
proletariat. The tidy schema of revolution worked out by Marx and
Engels in the Communist manifesto was a generalization from English and
French history, as we have already remarked. It distinguished
analytically between the bourgeois and the socialist revolutions and
stressed the historical precedence of the former to the latter. We have
already seen how Marx himself modified this schema in the concrete
context of nineteenth century Germany; the Legal Marxists, on the other
hand, stuck to this schema in a most doctrinaire fashion (foreshadowing
the whole history of social democracy and reformism) and with
disastrous consequences.

Accepting the Marxist distinction between the two revolutions and
the historical precedence of one over the other led the Legal Marxists
to argue for the reformist path to the transcendence of capitalism. One
of it’s leading proponents, Peter Struve, chastised Russian socialists
for concerning themselves with fanciful and unrealizable projects of
“heaven storming”; he, instead, wanted them to patiently “learn in the
school of capitalism”. The echo of that Legal Marxist injunction can
still be heard, via Bernstein’s “revisionism” in late-nineteenth
Germany, in social democratic circles in India today! This was, of
course, an abandonment of the proletarian viewpoint, as Lenin pointed
out. The mistake of the Legal Marxists lay precisely in an incorrect
understanding of the relationship between the dual tasks of the
proletariat. The democratic revolution was not an end in itself, as the
Legal Marxists tended to implicitly suggest, but was inseparably tied
with it’s twin, the socialist revolution. It is not that the Legal
Marxists did not accept the necessity of the socialist revolution;
being Marxists, they had to accept it as later-day social democrats
did. But this acceptance came with the caveat that the period
separating the two revolutions was so large that in essence one could
very well forget about the socialist revolution at the moment and
instead engage in activities to “learn in the school of capitalism”.

Though the Economists took a different lesson from the neat schema
of the Communist Manifesto as compared to the Legal Marxists, they
arrived at the same practical conclusions. For the Economists, it was
important to draw a sharp distinction between the economic and the
political spheres. In their opinion, workers were only concerned with
economic issues, issues of wage and work, that directly effected their
daily lives; they were not concerned with political issues, issues of
political freedom and governance and power. The political sphere,
according to the Economists, was the sole preserve of intellectuals;
since, moreover, the current conditions called for a
bourgeois-democratic revolution, socialist struggles, i.e., struggles
for the capture of state power by the proletariat, were pushed into the
indefinite future. Juxtaposing a sharp distinction between the economic
and the political with their reading of the schema of the Communist
Manifesto led the Economists to suggest that socialists should restrict
themselves “to support[ing] the economic struggle of the proletariat
and to participat[ing] in liberal opposition activity”. What was ruled
out was an independent political party of the working class, which axiomatically ruled out revolutionary political activity.

In an early piece on this issue in 1898, Lenin made clear the
correct Marxist understanding of the matter and distinguished the
social-democrats sharply from the Legal Marxists and the Economists:

“The object of the practical activities of the Social-Democrats is,
as is well known, to lead the class struggle of the proletariat and to
organize that struggle in both its manifestations: socialist (the fight
against the capitalist class aimed at destroying the class system and
organizing socialist society), and democratic (the fight against
absolutism aimed at winning political liberty in Russia and
democratizing the political and social system of Russia). We said as is
well known. And indeed, from the very moment they appeared as a
separate social-revolutionary trend, the Russian Social-Democrats have
always quite definitely indicated this object of their activities, have
always emphasized the dual manifestation and content of the class
struggle of the proletariat and have always insisted on the inseparable connection
between their socialist and democratic tasks — a connection clearly
expressed in the name they have adopted.” (Lenin, Collected Works, vol.
2, p. 327)

The inseparability of the dual tasks of the proletariat derives,
according to Lenin, from the following two facts: first, the
proletariat can only emancipate itself fully, and thereby society,
through political liberty. Hence, it supports the struggle for
political liberty against absolutism and feudal oppression as its own
struggle, as the political bed on which will grow the socialist
struggle. This is the reason why the class conscious proletariat
supports every revolutionary movement against the present social
system, why it supports the struggle of progressive classes against
reactionary classes and strata in general. Second, among all the
classes and strata fighting for democracy, the proletariat is the only
thoroughly consistent, unreserved, staunch and resolute supporter of
democracy; it is the only class which is ready to take the fight for
democracy to its end, to its natural culmination, to its full
completion. Every other class, by its very position within the class
structure of society, can only provide qualified support to the
struggle for democracy; their democracy is half hearted, it always
looks back, as Lenin put it. An understanding of the social-democratic
party as “deriving its strength from the combination of
socialist and democratic struggle into the single, indivisible class
struggle of the … proletariat” remained the hallmark of Bolshevism
right through the tumultuous days of the victorious October revolution.

It is this insistence on the uninterruptedness of the twin
revolutions that found expression in the Bolshevik formulation of the
proletariat as the leader of both the revolutions; and it is
the recognition of this historical role of the proletariat that
informed the refusal of the Bolsheviks to relinquish the leadership
role to the bourgeoisie, to become its political “tail”. It is the same
dogged insistence, so strikingly consistent, that led to the split with
the Mensheviks in 1903.

Two interesting and important things emerge from these early
debates. First, some of the ideas that were to dominate the subsequent
debates of the Russian revolution, the ideas moreover that would
separate the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks (the revolutionaries from
the reformists) and would separate Lenin (and Trotsky) from the rest of
the Bolsheviks between the February and the October revolutions, were
introduced within the Russian working-class movement at this juncture.
It is these ideas, among others, that would be refined, deepened,
enriched and applied with uncanny consistency in the subsequent history
of the Russian revolution. Second, that an eclectic, half-hearted,
formal and mechanical acceptance of Marxism can be combined with
utterly reformist politics came to the fore with rare clarity in
Russian history for the first time during these early debates. As later
events demonstrated, and continues to demonstrate to this day, formal
acceptance of Marxism can often be combined with reformist politics.

A closer reading of international working class history demonstrates
that acceptance of Marxism alongside reformist practice is already
hidden as a possibility in the formulation of the “dual tasks” of the
proletariat. It must be recalled the formulation of the “dual tasks”
found its way into the programme of the RSDWP in the distinction
between the minimum and the maximum programmes. The minimum programme
referred to the set of measures that could be implemented within, and
without challenging, a bourgeois democratic setup. Following the
Communist Manifesto, these included abolition of private property in
land, a progressive income tax, abolition of inheritance, free
education for all and other such concrete measures of bourgeois reform.
The maximum programme, on the other hand, enshrined revolutionary
aspirations, the overthrow of capitalism and the beginning of socialist
construction. The distinction between the minimum and maximum
programmes thus provided space for reformist politics by a gradual and
subtle decoupling of the two programmes and shifting the emphasis on
the former.

“One of the unforeseen effects of this division [between the minimum
and and maximum programmes] was to attract into social-democratic
parties a large body of members who by conviction or temperament were
more interested in the minimum than in the maximum programme; and in
countries where some of the minimum demands had in fact been realized,
and others seemed likely to be realized in the future, through the
process of bourgeois democracy, the parties tended more and more
to relegate the demands of the maximum programme to the category of
remote theoretical aims concentrate party activities on the realization
of the minimum programme.” (Carr, 1952, p. 17-18, emphasis added).

Lessons of 1905: Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

Though the dispute between what later came to be known as the
Bolsheviks (“the majority”) and the Mensheviks (“the minority”) during
the second congress of the RSDWP in 1903 seemed to rest on an issue of
party statute, i.e., what should be the qualification for party
membership, later events made clear that deeper issues of theory and
practice were involved. As the bitter debates following the split in
the party were to make clear, the schism in the RSDWP really rested on
different ways of understanding the relationship between the
dual tasks of the proletariat in concrete, practical terms. This
followed quite clearly from the diametrically opposite political
lessons the two streams drew from the failed revolution of 1905. The
difference can be most clearly seen if we organize the discussion
around the following two questions: (1) relationship of the two
revolutions, and (2) the role of the peasantry.

The Mensheviks adhered to the cut-and-dried formula about the strict
sequence of the two revolutions that they picked up in a doctrinaire
fashion from the Communist Manifesto. For the Mensheviks, the bourgeois
revolution had to come first and so far the Bolsheviks were in
agreement with them. The doctrinaire understanding of the Mensheviks,
their intellectual sterility, came to the fore when they went on, from
this correct premise, to insist that it was “only through the bourgeois
revolution that capitalism could receive its full development in
Russia, and, until that development occurred, the Russian proletariat
could not become strong enough to initiate and carry out the socialist
revolution” (Carr, 1950, p.39). In other words, the two revolutions
must be separated by an indefinite period of time during which
capitalism needs to develop, flourish, and display its bourgeois magic.

In effect, therefore, the Mensheviks never fully agreed with Lenin’s
1898 formulation of the “indissoluble link” between the two
revolutions; in fact their position was a regression even from the
position worked out by the first Congress in 1898 in Minsk. That is why
they could insist on allowing capitalism in Russia to receive it’s
“fullest development” and only then initiating the struggle
of the proletariat for socialism. The immediate and practical
implication of the Menshevik understanding was what Lenin termed
political “tailism”, i.e., allowing the proletariat as-a-class to
become an appendage to, a follower of, the bourgeoisie in the
democratic revolutionary struggle instead of forcibly usurping the
leadership position for itself.

The Menshevik position followed from an incorrect class analysis of
Russian society; their chief error was to neglect the emergence of the
proletariat on the historical scene and to take the cue from the Marx
of the Communist League to re-work the schema of the Manifesto. Thus,
on the eve of the revolution, one of their leading spokesmen could say:

“If we take a look at the arena of the struggle in Russia then what
do we see? Only two forces: the tsarist autocracy and the liberal
bourgeoisie, which is now organized and possesses a huge specific
weight. The working mass, however, is atomized and can do nothing; as
an independent force we do not exist; and thus our task consists in
supporting the second force, the liberal bourgeoisie, and encouraging
it and in no case intimidating it by presenting our own independent
political demands.” (quoted in Zinoviev, 1923).

This is precisely where Lenin differed sharply from Menshevik class
analysis and politics; Lenin’s analysis of the the 1905 revolution
started in fact with the recognition of the entrance of the Russian
proletariat on the historical scene. From this fact he drew the
conclusion that Marx had hinted at in his speech to the Central
Committee of the Communist League in 1850: the bourgeoisie was neither
willing nor capable of completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
This was both because it was weak (lacking in independent development)
and because it realized that completion of the democratic revolution
carried within it the danger of the proletariat’s political ascendancy.
Thus, completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, as a prelude
to the consummation of the socialist revolution, fell on the shoulders
of the Russian proletariat. The tight link between the two revolutions,
a position that Lenin had already worked out in 1898, was reiterated
once again:

“From the democratic revolution we shall begin immediately and
within the measure of our strength – the strength of the conscious and
organized proletariat – to make the transition to the socialist
revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop
half way” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 9, p. 237)

According to Lenin’s analysis, two important conditions had to be
satisfied for the Russian proletariat to complete its dual historical
tasks: (1) successful alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry,
and (2) victorious socialist revolutions in European countries. It was
on the crucial question of the alliance with the peasantry that Lenin
differed sharply not only from the Mensheviks but also from Trotsky
(who had otherwise worked out a position very similar to Lenin’s). For
both the Mensheviks and Trotsky, the peasantry was a repository of
reaction; while Trotsky arrived at this incorrect conclusion on the
basis of his experience of the 1905 revolution, the Mensheviks adhered
to this position out of their doctrinaire understanding of Marxism.
Lenin, on the other hand, realized that though the peasantry was not
revolutionary in the Narodnik sense but it’s force could still be
harnessed for the revolution because at that juncture it was less
interested in protecting private property than in confiscating the
land-owners’ land, the dominant form of rural private property (Carr,
1950).

Thus, Lenin arrived at an elegant formulation of the role of the
peasantry in the revolution. The proletariat, in alliance with the
whole peasantry would complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution and
overthrow feudalism, absolutism and the monarchy despite the
vacillation, or even opposition, of the bourgeoisie. This would
immediately lead to the next stage of the revolution, where the
proletariat would have to split the peasantry along class lines, ally
with the landless labourers and the poor peasantry against the rich
peasants and start the transition towards socialism.

This second point, where the urban proletariat had to ally with the
rural proletariat was an immensely important practical point. Between
the February and October revolutions, where Lenin discerned precisely
this transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the socialist stage
taking place, the utmost importance of an independent organization of the rural proletariat was repeatedly indicated. For instance in the third of the Letters From Afar written on March 11(24) 1917, which discusses the issue of the proletarian militia, he says:

“The prime and most important task, and one that brooks no delay, is
to set up organizations of this kind [i.e., Soviets of Workers’
Deputies] in all parts of Russia without exception, for all trades and
strata of the proletarian and semi-proletarian population without
exception…for the entire mass of the peasantry our Party … should
especially recommend Soviets of wage-workers and Soviets of small
tillers who do not sell grain, to be formed separately from
the well-to-do peasants. Without this, it will be impossible … to
conduct a truly proletarian policy in general…” (Lenin, 1917, in Zizek,
p. 41)

In a footnote, he adds: “In rural districts a struggle will now
develop for the small and, partly middle peasants. The landlords,
leaning on the well-to-do peasants, will try to lead them into
subordination to the bourgeoisie. Leaning on the rural wage-workers and
rural poor, we must lead them into the closest alliance with the urban
proletariat.” Note that in Lenin’s formulation, the idea of an
“agrarian revolution” as the axis of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution is not explicitly there; the experience of the Chinese
revolution would be required to extend the classical Marxist framework
further by explicitly theorizing the nature and complexities of the
agrarian revolution in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial social formation as
part of what Mao called the new democratic revolution. This constant
and critical engagement with received wisdom is the hallmark of a
living revolutionary tradition.

Revolution at the Gates: Between February and October 1917, and Beyond

The February 1917 revolution in Russia caught all the socialists
unawares; neither had they planned for it nor had they participated in
it. This was true as much of the Mensheviks as of the Bolsheviks. The
revolution had given rise to a situation of “dual power”: a Provisional
Government of the bourgeoisie and the landlords and a
revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants (in
the form of soldiers) in the form of the Soviets. The crucial question
that again divided the revolutionaries from the reformists was a
correct understanding of the relationship between the two.

For the Mensheviks, the problem was resolved in a rather
straightforward manner. In keeping with their schematic reading of
Marxism, they saw the task of the proletariat at the present moment to
be one of supporting the bourgeoisie and helping it complete the
democratic revolution; hence they argued for the Soviets supporting the
Provisional Government, pushing for democratic reforms from behind
rather than leading them, in short aiding in the “fullest development”
of bourgeois capitalism till such time that it [capitalism] exhausted
all it’s progressive possibilities and the proletariat became mature
and strong enough to make the final bid for power. All the Bolshevik
leaders, including Stalin, accepted the Menshevik position in essence.
It was left to the political genius of Lenin to break through this
reformist consensus.

Exiled in Switzerland and getting news about Russian development
only through the bourgeois press, Lenin had already started developing
the essentials of revolutionary understanding about the transition from the first to the second stage of the revolution; his Letters From Afar
give indications of the direction of his thinking. To the complete
astonishment of his followers, the first public statement that Lenin
made immediately after his arrival in the Finland station in Petrograd
in April 1917 was to hail the proletarian-socialist revolution and not
to dish out homilies for the bourgeois-democratic revolution! When he
presented his April Theses within party circles the next day, outlining a program for the transition to
a socialist stage of the revolution, he was completely isolated.
Bogdanov is said to have constantly interrupted his speech with shouts
of “Delirium, the delirium of a madman,” and not one Bolshevik other
than Kollantai spoke in favour of his plans. When it was published in
the Pravda, the editorial team distanced itself from the argument by attributing it to an individual and not to the Party.

Between the February and the October revolution, Lenin applied with
ferocious consistency the theory that he had developed so painstakingly
in his debates with the reformist Mensheviks. Formulations of the
indissoluble link between the two stages of the revolution and the
associated idea of the leadership of the proletariat (in alliance with
the peasantry) in the democratic revolution, which he had argued for
tirelessly over the years were now about to be realized in practice.
The fact that the proletariat and the peasantry (in the form of
soldiers) had established an independent, revolutionary site of
political power in the form of the Soviets was the crucial signal to
Lenin that the bourgeois-democratic revolution had been completed and
that the transition to the next stage was underway. Since there could
not be two powers in the State, only one of the two – proletarian or
bourgeois – would survive in the ensuing struggle that he could
foresee. The task of the proletariat, therefore, was to start preparing
for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and transferring all
power to the Soviets, and not to stand up in support of the
bourgeoisie, as the Mensheviks argued. Waiting for the “fullest
development” of capitalism, as reformist doctrine suggested, was
tantamount to ensuring that the Soviets got crushed by force like the
Paris Commune in 1871.

Note that in Lenin’s insistence on the completion of the
bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution there is no place for the
discourse of productive forces or the development of capitalism. It was
not that capitalism had flourished and the productive forces had
developed adequately in Russia between February and October 1917 to
warrant the call for a socialist revolution; that was obviously not the
case as the Bolsheviks were acutely aware. It was rather the case that
the establishment of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat
and the peasantry was envisioned as an alternative path of
development, a non-capitalist framework of social relations for the
development of the productive forces. It is of course not true that the
democratic revolution establishes socialism; its social and economic
content remains bourgeois, but with the proletariat at the helm of
affairs, a transition towards socialism is initiated, the movement is imparted an unmistakable socialist, i.e., proletarian orientation.

In the context of imperialism, questions about the character of the
two revolutions, about the role of communists in them and about the
question of the attitude towards capitalism in the colonial and
semi-colonial countries had been discussed threadbare in the Second
Congress of the Communist International in July 1920. Even though there
were disagreements between Lenin, the official rapporteur on
the “national and colonial question”, and M. N. Roy, who presented his
own theses on the question, they came out with one striking agreement:
where the working class was victorious and able to establish its
political hegemony, it could lead the country (essentially the peasant
masses) onto the path of socialism without the intervening capitalist
stage of development. Presenting his report to the Congress on July 26,
Lenin summarized this point of agreement as follows:

“… are we to consider as correct the assertion that the capitalist
stage of economic development is inevitable for backward nations now on
the road to emancipation and among whom a certain advance towards
progress is to be seen since the war? We replied in the negative.
If the victorious revolutionary proletariat conducts systematic
propaganda among them, and the Soviet governments come to their aid
with all the means at their disposal – in that event it will be
mistaken to assume that the backward peoples must inevitably go through
the capitalist stage of development… the Communist International should
advance the proposition, with appropriate theoretical grounding, that
with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward
countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages
of development, to communism, without having to pass through the
capitalist stage.” (Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 244, emphasis
added).

The essence of the democratic revolution under the leadership of the proletariat
is the inauguration of a non-capitalist path of economic and social
development. As Lenin points in the same report that we have just
quoted from, forms of socialist organization, i.e. Soviets, can and
should be formed not only in a proletarian context but also in a
context marked by “peasant feudal and semi-feudal relations”. It is
obvious that these institutions would impart the socialist orientation
to the whole movement, would form the seeds of the future socialist
society, seeds moreover nurtured, supported, defended and deepened in a
still predominantly bourgeois society. To insist, as some have done
recently, that the task of the proletariat during the democratic stage
of the world historical revolution is to work for deepening capitalism,
instead of forging a non-capitalist path of development through Soviet
forms of organization, is to turn 150 years of international
revolutionary working class theory and practice on its head.

Conclusion

The Menshevik position about the “fullest development” of capitalism
being a necessary condition for the launching of the socialist struggle
finds echoes in India today with the insistence on the development of
the “most thorough-going and broad-based” capitalism being the
precondition for initiating the socialist struggle. While it is hardly
surprising that such a position finds political expression in
inveterate “tailism”, what really is rather more difficult to believe
is the accompanying ahistorical rhetoric of “different” capitalisms. It
almost seems to have been asserted that we can choose among the
different varieties of capitalisms being offered by history, limited
only by our powers of imagination. Which one do you want comrade,
history seems to have asked? Well, the social democrats answered, we
want the one which is technologically progressive (leads to the fullest
development of the productive forces) and also looks after the welfare
of the workers and peasantry (through social reforms and huge
expenditures in health and education and nutrition). Does the march of
history and the development of the structural contradictions of global
capitalism at the beginning of the twenty first century afford us the
this luxury, this luxury to choose between capitalisms, between good
and bad capitalisms? One is reminded of how Marx had chastised Proudhon
in The Poverty of Philosophy for wanting capitalism without
it’s socio-economic ills. The social democrats in India seem hell bent
on committing the same mistake all over again.

[The author is associated with Sanhati (www.sanhati.com), a solidarity forum for resistance to neoliberalism in West Bengal, India.]